Take Charge – Carry Out the Plan of the Day

Anyone who knows me has come to realize that the twelve years that I spent as a naval officer left me with certain traits and patterns of speech that remain unique to that experience. During my so-called prime years what I had learned and had been trained to do by my service in Naval Aviation helped me to succeed or at least gave me the ability to outperform my peers.

That said, what my military education failed to provide is a means to achieve some sort of equilibrium when I entered the twilight zone of retirement. A wise man told me upon my leaving active duty that: you won’t like it out there – no one is in charge. He was right, of course, no one is in charge. The events of the past four years have made that evident. We live in a world that rolls forward in a chaotic clusterfuck of ineptitude, ignorance, and indifference. The recent deaths in tornadoes that hit Kentucky, where managers told employees whose plant was about to suffer a direct hit from the storm, that they would be fired if they left work to seek shelter.

Preparation and planning, leadership and execution are lost in a swirl of self-aggrandizement and abandonment of responsibility. At this point in my existence the lessons that were pounded into me from Pensacola to the Gulf of Tonkin resonate over and over again. If I had thought the world was fucked up then, my god, what a mess now.

As I rise each morning and slurp down that first jolt of caffeine, I am reminded of the phrase: Take charge and carry out the plan of the day.

To the uninitiated, that may sound like so much babble. But to my mind each day presents us with at least two opportunities to make something of ourselves and our lives. 

First, the words take charge. Well, I go back to the man who told me that in the world outside the military no one is in charge. Just listen to the news. The clusterfuck of politicians, disinformation mongerers, TV talking heads and insipid performers prattle on seeking to only add to their bloated fortunes. The fact is that if you are to make anything of the time you have on this earth, you, the person staring back at your image in the bathroom mirror, is the one, the only one in charge of your life.

If you want something or someone, if you need to make something of yourself or for yourself, then it is you who needs to take charge. If you expect someone else to have your best interests in mind – forget it. Four ex-wives have taught me that lesson. 

This doesn’t mean you have to be cruel or selfish. What it really means that in order for you to be your best, you and only you not only should but must take charge.

The second part of the phrase: carry out the plan of the day means that random action does not get anything accomplished. In the military, there is always a plan for the following day. It may be amended, altered, or even tossed aside as events may intrude upon it, BUT it is a place from which to start.

It might be as simple as having morning coffee and reading the paper, or as complicated as a lengthy travel itinerary, but what are you going to do with the hours that have been granted to you. As of this writing I have used up 643,800 hours of life out of what? Who knows when the boom will fall? And that is exactly the point.

Each morning I read the headlines of the obituaries of people who are much younger than I and I wonder about my own life. 

Back when my youngest son was living with me, he was going through a rough patch where he was ditching school, smoking dope, and aspiring to doing nothing but skateboarding and loafing. At one point during counselling at his school he was asked to relate his current situation to a rat in a maze. Did he have any goals? He just shrugged. His ambivalence to any help was coming through loud and strong. 

I had come to be a regular in the vice principal’s office and was on friendly terms with the counselors, so they knew a bit about me. One day they asked him if he didn’t want to be like his apparently goal-oriented father. My son, displaying a latent wisdom said, that if his father was the rat in the maze he wouldn’t follow the pathways, he would just chew his way through the walls to the goal.

I suppose that is true. My training taught me not to give up. Perhaps I should have recognized that in my marriages and let the ladies in question off the hook at an earlier time. But it goes back to what keeps me going.

At this point in life, with various bits of metal augmenting my original issue body parts, and with enough aches and pains to keep Salonpas and the makers of Advil in business for some time, I get up each morning with the hope that the plan of the day, or at least the one I imagined the previous night, will be fulfilled.